Category Archives: Account Based Marketing

Account-based marketing begins by selecting accounts that are considered the highest value accounts. These accounts typically have larger numbers of employees and more key decision makers involved.

However, with the advent of newer technologies and marketing tools, ABM will soon move out of the realm of larger enterprise accounts and into smaller sized accounts, providing more personalized services to a broader range of clients.

The concept of account-based marketing developed in the B2B realm, where companies wanted to deliver both sales and marketing solutions. Following these strategies below, you as a marketer will be able to add more than MQL value to the sales team, enabling your marketing team to have an impact in the sales process with insights on sales and deeper engagement with key decision makers.

The following cross-channel ABM strategies will help improve outreach and engagement with account members through a broader range of marketing channels.

Account-based marketing strategies for social channels

1. Get account mentions on social channels

You might be talking about these accounts on your blog, in other articles or case studies, or other gated and ungated content, but one of the best ways to improve reach and engagement from your target accounts is simply to mention them on social channels. You can mention or tag the account or key decision makers on social media channels. This will not only bring you their instant attention, but, also influencers in their social network.

2. Facebook custom audiences

Facebook advertising is another excellent social channel that will enable you to identify the right audience and accounts. You can garner social insights from such personal details as name, date of birth, phone number, email addresses, geographical location data, gender, Apple or Android’s advertising identification etc., to define target accounts and zero in on appropriate advertising activities on Facebook.

3. Tailored audience on Twitter

There are several ways you can take advantage of tailored audiences on Twitter in order to boost reach and engagement from targeted audience. These include:

a. As an advertiser who can insert a list of targeted Twitter profiles to whom you’d like to reach, to market and to sell.
b. Mention the Twitter tag in order to retarget viewers using Twitter ads.
c.Retarget your targeted mobile app users when you are promoting your mobile app through Twitter ads.

4. Make a list of Twitter handles of influencers in your target accounts

You can simply reach out to the key decision makers of targeted accounts through Twitter, by making a list of their Twitter handles. You can follow them, add them to the Twitter list or set notifications to get automatically notified when they tweet. Remember that while you follow them or add them to the list, they will instantly get a notification of your activity – so you can attract their attention to your profile, page, your tweets and your business.

Scan through their threads of their tweets, their followers, people they follow on Twitter, like, Retweet and comment on their Tweets to engage with them to start interacting with them. In that way, you can focus on the Twitter profiles who are interested in your product, service or offers.

5. Targeting company on LinkedIn

Another social media activity to target account companies is to target them on LinkedIn. You can use the LinkedIn ads tool which allows marketers to perform company-level targeting, to define company accounts on LinkedIn to target and to create ads for those targeted companies and key decision makers of those companies.

Account-based marketing strategies through email marketing

6. Make creative and informative email campaigns for ABM contacts

Email marketing campaigns are a great way to communicate on a more personal level with key contacts of target accounts. As a caution, however, you need to remember that sending emails that are unsolicited and too generic can get your emails reported as spam and put your email reputation at stake. On the other hand, you have the ability to get more creative, concise, polite, and more relevant while sending email. Remember that your contacts may start unsubscribing if you are sending too many mails, emails that are too long, or generally if you are not providing them with relevant information – which could, in effect, bring an early end of your ABM campaign.

7. Personalized email programs

Email offers one of the best platforms to initiate personalized communications with target accounts and key decision makers. Make sure you do not send batch and blast emails to your targeted contacts of our account-based marketing campaigns. Instead, create personalized messages that target the right contacts at the right time. One way to ensure better personalization is to add targeted contacts and decision makers to your own list of leads to follow up. The more personalized emails you send and follow up with your prospects, the more reach and engagement you get in B2B account-based marketing campaigns.

Account-based marketing strategies through direct marketing

9. Send gift boxes to key influencers and executives

Not just electronic gift cards, send actual gift boxes to your contacts, leads and prospects. So, along with that personalized email engagement programs in place, create direct marketing campaigns to send them gift boxes as seasonal gifts, special occasions and special dates, right on their desk. Accompany the gift box with a message with a personalized note, current stats or some other information they value. A real gift will delight your prospects and increase their odds of becoming customers.

10. Why just key employees? Send them all

Here you need to take account of the size of the company and number of recipients while you are planning to send gift boxes to all employees of the lead account of the ABM campaign. You can send individual gift boxes for all employees or else, you can send a huge gift box with a lot of items that everyone in the organization could share. Your gifts will instantly impress the leadership team as well as employees of the company and they will want to know more about the great company that sent them the goodies. You can also create social media buzz on the gift giving event by tagging them with a message for them and maybe in return, they can also help spread the social media interactions by responding on those same (or different!) channels. Wouldn’t you like to have that kind of social affirmation?

Do you think these account-based marketing tactics could be useful or effective in your situation? Would you like to implement them in your ABM campaign? Call us at (408) 502 6765 or reach us via our social channels Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to get help and learn more tips and industry updates on account-based marketing.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a guest post by Brandon Redlinger, Director of Growth at Engagio

B2B marketers can gain credibility throughout their organizations by quantitatively proving their business impact on leads, opportunities and, most importantly, revenue. In the last decade, marketers have gained the ability to increase quantity, track movement down a funnel, and measure ROI.

However, in the last handful of years, we’ve seen a few dramatic changes in the way B2B businesses are going to market. Enterprise decision makers and buying committees expect more from vendors because of the increased demand from their board and advancements in technology.

But with this rise In the modern era of marketing, it’s time for different success metrics. A new way of marketing calls for a new way of measuring.

That’s why Jon Miller and the Engagio team wrote The Clear and Complete Guide to ABM Analytics. This is the most comprehensive guide to modern marketing analytics. We dive into actionable tactics for qualitatively and quantitatively measuring marketing’s impact in complex deals with long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers.

In this post, we’ll dig into the new metrics for ABM and a how to start attributing impact of those programs.

The New Metrics for ABM

ABM metrics are different because they track accounts, not leads, they focus on quality not quantity, and they track impact and influence more than try to apportion ‘credit’. ABM is much more of a team effort than traditional demand generation.

In ABM, you must measure: coverage, awareness, engagement, reach, and impact. Let’s dig in a little deeper to each one.

1) Coverage
Do you have enough of the right people in your database? How complete is your account data?

These metric tracks data quality and comprehensiveness and should inform your strategic plan. In other words, how many of your target accounts have you researched? Do you understand each division with your target account? How many accounts do you have account-specific custom content for? Have you identified the main stakeholders and points of contact within every account? Do you have their contact information?

2) Awareness
Do your prospects know your company’s name and what you offer?

Web traffic is a good reflection of this — specifically, traffic coming from people within your target accounts. You should also track whether your key contacts are opening your emails, attending your events, and taking your phone calls.

3) Engagement
How engaged and interested are your prospects?

The more time they spend with your company, the more committed they tend to be.

Measure the number of minutes that someone spends with your brand. Track when they are responding to your marketing programs, but also when they interact socially, when they use your product, and when they talk with your sales team.

4) Reach
Are you reaching specific target accounts? Where are you wasting your efforts?

Track success by channel — for example, in a webinar campaign, you’d measure success by event attendance. Track the percent of target accounts that have success in each program as well. Finally, track your focus — what percentage of all program successes come from key accounts?

5) Impact
Which activities are generating the right results?

Traditional attribution models are difficult to apply to long sales cycles with multiple touches. ABM requires looking for correlations between activities and key sales outcomes. Mine your data to find insights like, “Accounts in the top 25% of engagement have 18% faster sales cycles than those in the bottom 25%.”

Attributing the Impact of Marketing Activities

Measuring impact has been Marketing’s holy grail since John Wanamaker famously admitted he didn’t know which half of his advertising dollars were wasted.

While B2B CMOs say measuring ROI is their top priority, less than 20% report having the capability (Forbes, 2016).

It’s finally possible for B2B marketers to ascertain programs that work and don’t, and how each affects revenue and profits. Armed with knowledge about individual and aggregated program ROI, marketers can use the insights to allocate budget for maximum impact.

ROI’s Purpose: Improve (Not Prove) Marketing
ROI is most valuable when evaluating marketing investments, not justifying marketing. Given the reality of budget limitations, CMOs need to make trade-offs about where to focus resources — and ROI provides a framework to improve these decisions.

Pro-Tip: Don’t use ROI analytics to “prove” marketing works, use them to “improve” decisions about where to focus resources.

Insight opportunity cost
When you spend time and energy justifying marketing, you waste time and resources. “Proving” marketing has an insight opportunity cost. Directed elsewhere, that same effort can create insight to improve marketing.

The Golden Ratio
Many teams find “Pipeline to Investment” is the best way to judge marketing programs. Also known as Marketing’s Golden Ratio, this concept shows CMOs how much pipeline each dollar produces for individual program investments.

CMOs calculate Golden Ratios with multi-touch attribution by adding up total pipeline attributed to each program.

Conclusion

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. How do you get started with ABM analytics? What people, processes, and technologies will you need along the way? How to start your ABM journey depends on many different factors.

To take a deep dive into mapping your account journeys, the new account-based funnel, the different types of multi-touch attribution models for B2B marketing, and more, pick up Jon Miller and Engagio’s new Clear and Complete Guide to ABM Analytics today!

These days, importance of account-based marketing is hard to ignore in the B2B marketing field in achieving revenue growth. But, marketers who are solely relying on ABM strategies with no attention paid to other marketing strategies could be making a serious mistake. Especially if they have not tapped the potential of targeting, educating and personalizing communication of social media, they could be retracting possibilities of better account selection, more effective nurturing, more personalized offers, direct meetings, more accurate retargeting, better messaging and many other perks of social media integration. Why? Simply because social media, similar to account-based marketing, aids in building personalized relations with prospects and customers, customized communications, finding and focusing on the right accounts, and targeting and communicating with influencers and audiences. No wonder many ABM marketers are adopting social media integration to their account-based marketing campaigns.

Here we have explained 3 major ways marketers are leveraging social media in their account-based marketing campaigns and how they do it.

1. Listening to the accounts

Listening to the target accounts is one essential tasks of ABM marketers to be able to decode what they are most frequently talking about, the type of product and services they are discussing, features and functions most valuable to them and what they are complaining about. Thus, marketers can gain insights and ideas on how to create personalized messages for their target accounts and key decision makers. Since account-based marketing brings marketing and social teams together to coordinate, both teams can utilize social media for individual listening purposes and for targeting their audience.

a. Marketing teams can leverage the ‘List’ option on Twitter and add all accounts of companies and key decision makers to keep a tab on their posts and discussions. You can follow them and get more interactive with them by dropping comments to their posts. You can also follow their mostly used hashtags to know what interests and engages them the most.

b. Sales teams can use social media to spot the major decision makers to contact while dealing with a specific account. For this, they can use special tools such as, LinkedIn Sales Navigator that enables finding extremely relevant information and major highlights which will factor in creating sales pitches while following the account.

Earlier we learned how to use social media for listening to the target accounts and key people in those companies. Here we will guide you on how you can use regular social media listening practices to improve your understanding of your target accounts:

a. Social media listening will reveal a lot about exactly which third-party sites and content sources target accounts are mostly using to dig up information and which they mostly rely on.

b. Knowing the format of content they most search, read and download, whether it is blogs, infographics, research findings, whitepapers, e-books, or videos will help you figure out what kind of content you need to create the most to engage your prospects.

c. The kind of solutions and problems they are mostly searching over Google and social media channels will help you define their needs, expectations, and kind of solutions they seek in your product. At the same time you can also understand the features and functionalities they seek to improve their customer servicing and satisfaction so that you can understand their challenges and goals to help them replace the previous vendor with your product and services.

3. To compose and optimize content to target accounts and decision makers

Now that you have started listening to your target accounts and key people in those accounts via social media, you can use the insights and information in developing the right content strategy for engaging the audience. This is another great way to leverage social media platforms to promote the content optimized to the audience and grab their attention at the right time. Thus, you can spread awareness, educate, and highlight best features and functionalities of your products by publishing informative and engaging content on social media.

Especially if you have launched your account-based marketing program, then social media content promotion will come in exceptionally handy for you – here are some tips on how to maximize the impact of social media content publication:

You have already learned what kind of content they mostly consume and it is time to put the insights in good use. So, what format of content and events are they reading, downloading and engaging the most? In addition to promoting gated content via email marketing campaigns, you can expand the reach by promoting those gated content via promoting the content and events on social media platforms.

In addition to promoting gated and blog content, another format of content that works a great deal in engaging audiences and establishing credibility is case studies which are relatable to the industry of the target accounts. While promoting case studies on social media, you can tag or mention the stakeholders’ profile to attract, reach and engage – if you notice that the stakeholders are not responding then stop tagging them.

Apart from promoting the content from your official social media pages, you can post those links in the comments section below the posts of your target accounts to key people involved in closing deals. You can also post helpful and informative comments to engage your target audience with your replies. However, see that you do not overdo embedding links to your content on their posts or the content will appear too promotional and spammy.

On the other hand, your genuinely thoughtful and useful comments and replies to their posts will draw more attention of your customers and will help you establish your thought leadership in the industry.

Do you find this information helpful for your account-based marketing projects? In case you need more tips and guidelines or professional assistance for your account-based marketing campaigns, just give us a call at (408) 502 6765. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages to keep a tab on latest news, trends, technologies and updates on account-based marketing. Don’t forget to leave your mark or comments – we love to hear from you.

According to the survey on ‘Sales and Marketing Sentiment’ by CallidusCloud, about 84 percent of companies have their marketing and sales teams not synchronized. Lack of coordination hinders B2B marketers and sales professionals in accessing insights from both teams and they cannot measure their performance, contribution in closing of a deal, and overall success of the company. Often the misalignment between these two teams cause these teams to blame each other when the company fails to meet sales target of conversion. If you are trying to build an account-based marketing campaign, you need to draw these two teams closer to win accounts and stakeholders in your target company’s marketing and sales teams. Why?

Misalignment of sales and marketing teams would incur B2B businesses to lose at least 10% revenues every year.

On the other hand, businesses who achieve successful alignment of marketing and sales teams have witnesses around 20% revenue growth in a year.

Aligned sales team can avoid loss of efforts and time on unqualified leads.

Marketing teams source data from sales teams to seek customers’ feedback and find out their expectations and needs.

Marketing teams when aligned with sales teams can make direct contribution in revenue goals.

Aligned account-based marketing approaches help a great deal in identifying major decision makers or stakeholders in marketing, sales, finance, and operations teams. How does marketing and sales alignment work in boosting revenue growth?

1. Define mutually agreed and understood terms

As per the survey findings by CSO Insights, around 44% of B2B enterprises have their marketing and sales teams understanding of what qualified leads are. Common notions and understanding of what qualified leads means to both sales and marketing teams are necessary to set the ABM strategies into the motion. That’s why the first step of establishing alignment between marketing and sales teams is to remove the discord between them and get sales and marketing to define what qualified leads mean and the metrics to determine qualified leads.

Here we have explained how marketing and sales teams define qualified leads as the first step to build alignment between the teams.

How do marketing teams define qualified leads? Marketing teams using Marketo use various metrics to determine the quality of the lead before passing it to the sales team. Metrics and scoring involved in the qualifying process is MQL, which combines ‘fit score’ that defines if the lead fits to their ideal target company, ‘engagement score’ which measures the level of engagement through content with the company, and ‘buying intent’ that measures purchase indicators of the company. These three metrics help determine the quality of leads and if they are qualified enough to pass to the sales team.

How do sales teams define qualified leads? Marketing teams share MQLs to the sales teams or departments, and sales representatives or sales development reps (SDR). This is done to define which sales reps should be assigned which target accounts in order to close the deal successfully. In general, any qualified lead is considered as a potential lead because that has higher chances of getting converted.

2. Selection of right, high-value accounts

Once the marketing and sales teams have been on the path of starting with the account-based marketing, you need to bring together your marketing and sales departments or teams to discuss how to select the right accounts. There are various technologies and tools account-based marketing platforms offer that marketers can use in selecting the right accounts. Then, you need to focus on the target accounts that sales teams are already working or dealing with – get insights and information on target accounts, stakeholders and key decision makers of the accounts from the sales teams that they have collected so far. Focus on the accounts that they are already dealing with and start your account-based marketing campaigns with those accounts first. Both sales and marketing teams need to engage in regular communications and stay aligned to discuss their objectives.

In the account selection process, marketers can use software that is tied to marketing automation techniques as these softwares monitor, measure and provide behavioral data, history of interactions of targeted accounts and other important data that help marketing and sales teams identify the right accounts that fit the criteria. ABM platforms with marketing automation technologies enables reaching out to selected account companies and decision-makers through automated, scheduled and timely communications with the right content.

3. Pick the right channels and content to engage

After selection of accounts and accessing insights on target accounts and their decision-makers, you need to choose the right channels they most engage in and the type of content they interact and use. Next, marketers need to send personalized messages to key people involved in closing the deal. That is why you need to target them through channels they are most active in, from email, direct mails, blogs, online forums, discussion boards, social media channels, to news sites and other channels. Many account-based marketing platforms, such as Marketo, provide insights on decision makers’ online activities and their interactions with previous communications, what they want from similar products and how they correspond with the products and brands.

Create a series of infographics, visuals and memes, blogs, quizzes and contests and present latest market stats to incorporate in your account-based marketing campaigns and circulate those in various channels where your target people are active. By educating and nurturing prospects with such creative messages, you can figure out their interests and preferences. You can also optimize personal messages with the insights and data collected from sales teams that are already dealing with the account.

4. Begin Active Outreach

By circulating the campaign messages to the prospects at the right time, your marketing teams have paved the way for sales teams to start their actions to improve their outreach. After your marketing professionals have spread the coverage and made prospects aware of your products and brand, they will feel familiar to respond and interact with your sales team’s calls, messages, and emails. Thus, effective account-based marketing and sales team alignment can significantly increase the effectiveness of both marketing and sales campaigns, boosting confidence of both the sales and marketing reps to close the deal successfully.

5. Monitor, measure & customize

We all know that no marketing campaigns solely can crack the nut without comprehensive, real-time insights and analytics that keep optimizing the campaigns according to responses. That’s why it is immensely important to keep track of the effectiveness and the performance of the account-based marketing campaigns to stay creative, relevant and personalized to your buyers’ and prospects’ growing interests. Most ABM platforms like Marketo allow tailoring campaigns to real-time analytics and data so that marketers and sales reps can modify sales pitches and marketing communications to make them relate to their needs and preferences perfectly.

Thus, your ABM strategies should keep your marketing and sales teams in sync in approaching their target accounts, their goals and challenges, their personas, in circulating messages through right channels. Both teams should minimize conflicts and practice transparency to be able to share their data, plans, changing strategies and approaches, as well as occasional failures through the buying cycle to keep each other informed of what works and what does not.

Do you find these tips useful? Join us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn channels to get more tips and updates to maximize output of your account-based marketing campaigns.

Are you planning to migrate marketing resources to account-based marketing? ABM gives these large clients just what they want – personalized services and deeper engagement. Account-based marketing strategies are more effective for a business when it is targeting larger customers with specific customized services and more personalized communications. That’s why the key to achieve success in account-based marketing must begin with identifying high-value customers who can drive return on your investments of marketing resources to engage those target accounts.

If you are to begin the account-based marketing for your business and searching for a roadmap to success, following six actionable steps will enable you to drive for success in ABM.

Step 1: Identify high-value accounts

Marketers should use firmographic data (details on the target account organizations including their annual revenue, growth, employees, hierarchy, leadership team and specific important employees and their job function). At the same marketers should also pay attention to other details to find accounts that are influential to markets such as business intelligence data (or BI) to extract and analyze raw data on potential businesses and influence of those accounts in the market, chances of conversion and higher profit margins.

Step 2: Spot key internal players

After you have delved into the organizational data and identified the right kinds of target accounts, you need to identify the specific employees who will be the key decision makers in deals that you are about to make. That’s why it is important to understand the hierarchy and job functions in detail for each client, to understand specifically how their influence will play out in the negotiation and the deal. For this, marketers can seek such data from the sales development team; they can set a related market survey in motion, or simply purchase or source from a third-party market research data.

Step 3: Create personalized content & messages

Since the central idea of account-based marketing is to deliver more custom solutions and engage targeted accounts with personalized communications – this step is quite significant. Many marketers try to entice their targeted accounts by putting clients’ business name on their web banner ads but this tactic has not been proven enough effective in ensuring purchase. Instead, marketers should aim at deepening engagement from their accounts with valuable and usable content related to the clients’ problem areas and their major business challenges. Plan your content and communications in ways that target your clients’ main concern and will explain how your products/content/solutions can help them addressing those pain points.

Step 4: Define best channels to connect

To properly segment your content in ways that enable you to engage effectively with your clients, marketers need to decide on the best channels to connect to their target audience. Whether it is email blast, drip email marketing campaigns, direct marketing, web ads, mobile marketing, social channels or print media – figure out the optimal media and channel before you start circulating the content and messages. You need to remember that not all channels are equally effective for all client accounts and for certain people involved in those accounts. There should be a coordinated effort between marketing and sales survey teams in looking for the channels where accounts and key influencers can be found. You should also consider the type of industry they are in, the region where they are operating, opt-in rules to build your list for that channel and other essential considerations to adopt the right channel strategy for account-based marketing campaign.

Step 5: Well-synced, targeted campaign

Once your content and messages are ready with a great channel strategy in place and geared up to begin your account-based marketing campaign, you still need to evaluate the efficacy of the campaign so that key decision makers, leadership teams and other people playing important role in the purchase can engage with it. Marketo users can use ABM tools embedded in the marketing automation platform and leverage tools such as real-time personalization to optimize for key influencers, personalized ad banners for web and social channels, the Ad Bridge tool that ultimately bridges the gap between key players and marketer and assures that the campaigns are targeted and coordinated between marketing and sales team. Marketo als offers an excellent tool set that will enable you to follow up and monitor your campaigns using the different kinds of metrics needed by the marketing and sales teams.

Step 6: Monitor, measure & optimize

The importance of monitoring, measuring, following up with more optimized messages and solutions bring us to the last step of account-based marketing success recipe. Like other marketing strategies, account-based marketing also needs painstaking and accurate monitoring and analysis to test and ensure the performance of your campaigns. With ABM, marketers might be running multiple campaigns, and they need to use diverse metrics for different types of campaigns they are running to see if the campaigns are yielding enough reach and web visits, engagements, responses over campaigns, appointments, scope for sale conversion and revenue from potential accounts. Make sure your sales and marketing teams coordinate to discuss the metrics they are using and their key findings from the analytics they use for evaluating the success of ABM campaigns.

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